Captain Fractal examines how political identities, media algorithms and institutional resistance to change reproduce conflict and instability.
We mistake the brain for the seat of intelligence and the individual for its owner. Both depend upon a much larger system.
Extreme wealth preserves its own stability by shifting costs onto everyone else. Captain Fractal explores why even billionaires cannot escape the physics of their own existence.
Over coffee, Captain Fractal considers a civilisation whose communication systems increasingly reward the behaviours that undermine its survival. The machinery isn’t broken. That’s the problem.
When humanity finally runs out of idiots to put in charge, it turns to Captain Fractal. Armed with decades of systems thinking, a ridiculous hat and a dangerous understanding of consequences, he sets about un-fucking civilisation.
Categories
On Blogging
The internet promised freedom of expression. Instead, it has created a communications environment where serious thought carries increasing personal risks, while trolling, manipulation and intimidation flourish.
The greatest threat from Big Tech isn’t superior intelligence. It’s ordinary stupidity armed with extraordinary power.
Technocratic civilisation maintains its continuity through repeated technical discontinuity, and its security through the management of insecurity.
Civilisation has made its own destruction so profitable that its survival now constitutes a threat to the economy.
Our political and commercial systems profit from the crises they perpetuate, rendering meaningful dissent unintelligible and civilisational failure commercially indispensable.
The Soviet Union collapsed, capitalism declared victory, and everyone went shopping. Now political instability is a profitable industry, foreign adversaries exploit the machinery, and the race to the bottom has become self-financing.
Categories
The Attention Engine
Civilisations have collapsed before. What distinguishes ours is a communications economy that profits from accelerating the disturbances society must then struggle to absorb. The danger lies in a recursive feedback system that rewards instability while transferring its consequences to everyone else.
